The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Philosophically, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

An intriguing statement and builds a thought-provoking story around the current context of technology developments. It is a fascinating example to see how the technology developments in computer science have moved from individual technology parts to become something better, something greater.

Computer science has always been an attractive subject and field of study. It always had something for the technology enthusiasts to learn and explore and that led to invention of various theories, new products and technology solutions.

To name a few, the operating systems Unix and Windows, Databases such as Oracle, SQL, programming languages C, Java, .Net, various licensed and open source product suites such as Microsoft office, Adobe and many more in the endless list. All these have been pillars of technology adoption across various industries and led the way for more improvements. 

Additionally, there were various theories and concepts emerged about those fields which did not make a real impact until recently such as AI, Analytics, cloud etc...

The common factor each of these technologies and theories had that they were born because of innovation and served many purposes. The innate capabilities of all these technologies and products have facilitated organizations to join the movement of technology adoption. Every organization opted for one or more technologies in native or customized form to support, enable and promote their business.

While the individual technologies helped organizations to achieve desired goal, it also created some by-products in the process of technology adoption. The by-products were primarily the technology silos, process inefficiencies and mountain of routine and repetitive work.

There was always a technology gap which did not allow these individual products to integrate and collaborate well. Hence, it needed human intelligence to manage the gaps, to handle things which could not be done otherwise by the individual technologies.

Eventually these by-products have become one of the significant reason to slow down the acceleration of business growth. Organizations see these factors as a force which doesn’t allow them to maintain the pace of growth.

The organizations (enterprises or smaller firms) needed a solution which can help them with little investment of time, effort and money and most importantly without affecting their prior investment in existing technologies.

The individual technologies are great to manage their own sphere of activity but what really missing, was an integrated approach which can bind all these technologies together to build something new, something that can take the best of each of these fields to provide a composite solution.

A whole (in the sense of completeness and unabridged) solution was needed to take off the burden of repeat activities from humans and let them best utilize their intelligence and potential for creative and innovative work.

It only became possible with technology transformation and the thought process to build integrated automation platforms. The thought process was to build simple, highly adaptable and composite solutions which helps to automate repetitive work. The inception of automation platforms(RPA, ITPA,Cognitive etc...) has started building the bridges to fill the technology gaps and resulting into smooth integrations between various distinct technologies. These platforms did not come out to replace any individual technology components rather to complete and complement them.

In general, the automation platforms have emerged as an integrated solution with capabilities to write workflows, record activities, screen scraping, scripting, integrate with various technologies such as OS, DB, programming languages, office, Adobe etc… Additionally, there are also instances when the product vendors have included flavor of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics to improve the solutions.

These automation platforms are going through an evolution journey to continuously build new integration solutions to extend their reach for more and more technologies. The automation platforms have embarked a journey to become a whole solution which can in fact become greater than the sum of individual technology components.